| | What a can of worms! Let's see what I can contribute to the bonfire...
I note that Mr. Bidinotto refers to Wendy McElroy as a source, which is like citing OJ as a character witness. Wendy, IMHO - having had many sad encounters with her, is and has been for decades an intellectually dishonest and manipulative person. I would not trust anything she said about anyone. Then, the terrible Murray Rothbard is cited, as though association with him is somehow a mark of the beast. Note that Rothbard was welcome at Rand's inner circle parties for some time, until he withdrew on his own after being (reportedly) treated with contempt by Branden, who insisted on calling him "Rossbott," in caracature of Rand's accent. Rothbard is a very highly regarded economist, BTW, and not just in anarchist circles.
The general tenor of Mr. Bidinotto's attacks leads me to discount him more than Ron Paul.
Just for the record, in spite of John Armaos's slander against me, when I pointed out that the Spartan's were the number one practitioners of Man/Boy love in Greece, and that it was an accepted part of their culture, and he responded by implying that I supported child rape, I do not support rape of anyone.
However, the questioning of an arbitrary age of consent is hardly without merit. I would suggest that many people are not mature enough to take on the risks of sex even at age fifty, much less age eighteen. However, there is a wide variation in judgment and intelligence. Recently, as noted on NPR, a bill was introduced in Canada, hardly a notorious hotbed of pedophilia, to raise the legal age of consent from the currently legal 14 years old. In many states in the U.S., last time I checked, the age of consent is 16, and in some states even lower.
When I moved to California in 1976 from Georgia, I assumed that it was 16 here as well, and I roomed with a very bright freshman scholar at Cal State University of Long Beach who was only 17, without a clue that I was doing anything illegal. In fact, here in the OC, even though the age of consent is 18, due to state law, exceptions are de facto granted to ethnic Mexicans, who frequently get married in Mexico at age 14.
As to racism, I do not know Paul's position, and, for that matter, I am not even a big supporter of Ron Paul. However, is it racism to note that about half of the black males in the U.S. have been convicted of some serious crime? Sure, part of that is due to a biased legal system. However, there are many areas in the L.A. area that are not safe for me to visit as a white man, simply because of my skin color. There are correspondingly few areas where being black is likely to result in an assault - although historically this has not always been the case, for sure.
I have nothing against someone for being black. As Rand pointed out, this is silly barnyard socialism. I have numerous black friends and have had several serious black girlfriends over the years, going back to the '60's in Georgia, when it was not safe. I participated in the civil rights movement.
That does not prevent me as a human being from noting that the urban black ghetto culture as such is not especially worthy of praise, and that there is a large subculture of multi-generational welfare mothers who live off other people's efforts. I.e., they are parasites. I recall Jesse Jackson remarking that it was sad but true that if he heard someone walking behind him on a dark street, and, upon turning, saw that it was a white man, he felt instant relief. Is he a racist on that account?
Or, when I drove a cab in the OC during the '80's and quickly discovered that I had a 50% run-out rate from my black customers, as opposed to a zero run-out rate from Hispanics. I asked the black drivers how I should deal with this. The black cabbies told me that they got money up front from any black customer, each and every time without exception.
The solution is of course to find ways to deal with people as individuals. This is not possible in many circumstances, such as being a cabbie. (Of course, if we had a general social contract, then we could have private ID cards that certified that we were contractees in good standing and could be counted upon to pay our bills, which would go a long ways toward eliminating business behavior based on prejudice, in favor of the individual merits of the person.)
In the late '60's, and early '70's, when the black civil rights movement made its tragic shift to being the "black power" movement, there was a consequent major sea change in attitudes of both blacks and whites. See Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers http://www.tomwolfe.com/RadicalChic.html. I recall how the young radical blacks on the university campuses of the day raved about "offing honkies" and the coming (Marxist) revolution.
In response to a wave of general rudeness and aggression by many blacks during this period, the whites who had quietly hoped that racism would just go away were often pushed into a state of prejudice. It only takes a few nasty incidents before one starts unconsciously anticipating more of the same and reacting accordingly. If this is the context from which critical comments by Rockwell or Rothbard are taken, then it hardly constitutes signs of racism.
(Edited by Phil Osborn on 1/16, 8:44pm)
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